Posted by Fahd Imtiaz, Senior Product Manager and Miguel Montemayor, Developer Relations Engineer, Android Developer Experience

Today at Galaxy Unpacked, Samsung unveiled its latest lineup of foldable and wearable devices. For developers, this means that the variety of form factors, screen sizes, and device postures your app needs to support is expanding once again.

With devices like the Galaxy Z Fold8, the ecosystem is expanding to include hardware with a landscape-first natural orientation and a wider aspect ratio in its main display state. Whether a user is unfolding a large display, flipping open a cover screen, or glancing at their wrist, users expect a flawless experience. To help you meet this moment, we’re sharing actionable guidance and new tooling updates to enable you to build adaptively proactively.

Rethink layout architecture for dynamic displays, including ultra-wide foldables

Building for the latest foldables means dropping assumptions about display orientation and size. This is especially true for the Galaxy Z Fold8, which adopts an ultra-wide display, adding to the variety of aspect ratios to account for.  Devices with this landscape-first natural orientation show the limitations of hardcoded layout rules when users unfold the device. That’s why we’ve introduced dedicated guidance for building for landscape foldables and trifolds.

To build a responsive UI that handles these physics seamlessly, focus on the following core pillars:

• Build fluid, adaptive layouts: Wide aspect ratios and compact vertical heights require fluid UIs that scale responsively. Our updated adaptive design guidance advises considering the window class width first to determine layout changes, then adjusting for height. To let individual components fluidly adapt to the grid, structure your layout using flexible containers that allow your content to automatically wrap, span, and reflow. For design inspiration browse our adaptive sample app and dual-screen design galleries.
• Track actual app space: Your app’s display space rarely matches the physical device size, especially on an ultra-wide screen during multi-window, split-screen, or multitasking states. Sometimes even the orientations differ. Leverage Window Size Classes using the Jetpack Window Manager library to calculate the exact space your app occupies.